Buon Appetito

Claire, my youngest daughter, loves Italian food! For her birthday in December she requested a homemade Italian dinner with the family. I opted for Buca di beppo instead and it was delicious! Since we are now trying to learn some new recipes and cook together at home, Claire chose Baked Ziti as our first official cooking adventure. I ordered an Italian cookbook, but I’m still waiting for it to be delivered. So we looked online and chose Lidia’s Baked Ziti. It looked easy enough and she seems to know a little more than I do about cooking an Italian meal, so here we go!

The Italians have quite a long list of “courses” when they sit down to eat. We started with our version of an antipasto dish which was bruschetta. I should at least pronounce it correctly since it deserves that much…bru-sket-ta! We could have stopped there and made that the main course, as we could not stop going back for one more bite as we waited for our primo portion of our meal to finish cooking.

Finally, the baked ziti was cooked to perfection, or maybe it was more like blackened to perfection. It was appetizing though! It was full of melted cheeses, homemade marinara sauce, garlic, onions and seasonings. We ate til we were full! We were all ready for a nap after lunch. Although it may take a few more tries to get this recipe just right, my girls have an Italian dish they like and one they can make themselves.